Here’s where I’m going to be at Worldcon! If you’ll be there, please come to any of these– especially my “Table Talk”, where I’ll dish behind-the-scenes info on Management Lessons from Game of Thrones.
My Worldcon Schedule
Category: Books
Not-A-Guest Blogging: I Read This Stuff So You Don’t Have To
My article on Badger Books is now up at Galactic Journey, where I’m now a regular staffer rather than a guest blogger! Badger Books, and their main writer Lionel Fanthorpe, are a great example of the sort of things I love to watch/read so you don’t have to: completely awful, and yet with a certain idiosyncratic joy that shines through even the worst novels. Check them out.
Management Lessons In The Wild
Management Lessons from Game of Thrones is featured on Cora Buhlert’s Non-Fiction Spotlight! Click here to read it.
Management Lessons From Game of Thrones: The Campaign
My book Management Lessons from Game of Thrones is out now (click the title for purchase links). And it needs your help!
Specifically, I need your help to have the wackiest impact case study in the history of the business school.
For those of you who aren’t in British academia: an impact case study is a portfolio of items which demonstrate that some part of a professor’s research has had a significant impact on some part of wider society.
And I think Management Lessons from Game of Thrones has serious potential to have an impact on some part of wider society, so:
Buy it! Read it! Use it in your Introduction to Management courses! But more importantly, tell me, and tell the world! Review it! Let me know which courses and where!
If you’re a reviewer for a blog or a podcast or a magazine, DM me about review copies! I’m @drfionamoore on all major social media.
Whatever you do—let’s make sure Management Lessons from Game of Thrones gets seen!
Not sure you want to buy it? Here’s a taste.
Where to Buy Management Lessons From Game of Thrones
This is the management textbook you never knew you wanted, but now you know you have to have it. The hardback has a scary academic price tag, but the paperback has a nice friendly RRP of £20/$30 or equivalent.
Amazon UK link here
Buy direct from publisher here
Unfortunately Bookshop.org doesn’t seem to have it, so if you want to buy direct from your local bookshop (and please do) you’ll have to communicate with them directly: the ISBN is 978 1 83910 528 9.
“Management Lessons from Game of Thrones” goes to Worldcon!
I can now reveal that I’ll be presenting a paper on “Pathways to Female Leadership in Game of Thrones”, based on some of the work you can find on this blog, at ChiCon8, the 80th World SF Convention, in Chicago this September! I’ll be attending in person, so will also be turning up on various panels and roaming around promoting my new book as well.
You can read my blog series on Leadership in Game of Thrones here, and you can preorder my book on the subject.
The Lunchtime Writer Part Four: The Lunchtime Editor
This post is about what happens when I’m sitting down to write, but not writing.
Whether or not you include editing time as part of your Lunchtime Writing activities is entirely a personal choice. Some people might want to bang out as many words as possible, and schedule editing separately. Some might write the words on the weekday and do editing on the weekend. It’s up to you.
I like to include editing as part of Lunchtime Writing. To my mind, editing is also writing, and there are days when I want to be generating new words, and other days when I’m really not in that headspace.
The problem is, of course, that editing doesn’t break down as neatly as word count. Mindful that, as I said, writing 500 words usually takes me about half an hour, I tend to organise Lunchtime Editing sessions that way: half an hour to forty-five minutes of editing work. Sometimes, though, it seems more natural to do it by sections: two full chapters of a novel, for instance, or 3,000 words of a story. You could also mix it up: 250 words plus 15 minutes of revisions, perhaps.
The danger of not including editing in your Lunchtime routine, also, is that you might put it off too much. Many writers hate editing, and it can be easy, when you’re working to a Lunchtime Writing routine, to say “I’ll do it at the weekend,” and then somehow never find the time. So including it as part of Lunchtime Writing makes it more certain that you’ll get on to it.
If you’re experimenting with Lunchtime Writing, I’d advise you to give including editing as part of your lunchtime a try. If you find you’d rather keep it separate, then fair enough. But editing’s another thing you need to find time for doing regularly, whether it’s at lunchtime or in a separate session.
Preorder “Management Lessons From Game of Thrones”!
So, Management Lessons From Game of Thrones, based on (but expanding on!) my blogpost series Leadership Lessons From Game of Thrones, is coming out in July and you can preorder it right now!
Buy direct from publisher here
This is the management theory book you never knew you wanted– order it now!
The Lunchtime Writer Part Three: The Scheherazade Effect
Last time, I talked about how Lunchtime Writing is a good way to find time in your busy day to write. A regular routine of writing a small amount of words keeps you working steadily at your manuscript, allowing you to write over 100k words in a year.
But there’s another benefit to Lunchtime Writing which I call the Scheherazade Effect.
If you remember your Thousand and One Nights, you’ll remember that Scheherazade the storyteller weaponised the cliffhanger, stopping her stories at an exciting point so that the sultan wouldn’t execute her, because he wanted to find out what happened next.
Forcing yourself to stop after a small number of words has a similar effect on the brain. You go through the rest of your day thinking about what’s going to happen. Maybe running through dialogue options, or trying out different things your characters could do in response to the situation you’ve left them in.
By the time the next lunchtime rolls around, and you’re sitting down to write again, you’ve thought it all through, and the next 500 words just flow.
So, it’s not just about writing a small number of words so as to fit your schedule: it’s also about stopping writing, so that your brain goes on working on the manuscript in between. Making those 500 words count, and reducing editing time.
Which is what we’ll talk about next time….
The Lunchtime Writer Part Two: How To Lunchtime Write
Welcome back to The Lunchtime Writer! In this post I’m going to expand on what I mean by Lunchtime Writing, and lay out the basics of how to do it.
As I said in the first post of this series, Lunchtime Writing doesn’t necessarily mean writing at lunchtime. What I mean by Lunchtime Writing is, writing in short, regular bursts, the sort of thing one could, potentially, do at lunchtime. Myself, I’m technically a Before Work Writer, because I tend to do my writing around eight AM before the working day begins, and you could also do it in the evenings if you’re so inclined.
The point, though, is to write a small number of words, but do it regularly. My own usual routine is to write around 500 words a day.
But the other point is to do it regularly. I write 500 words, or equivalent writing-related work (more on this in later posts), every day– workdays and weekends. Writing, for me, is like playing a musical instrument or learning a language: the key to it is to do it regularly and often, and make it part of your routine.
Which is the “secret” (not a secret) to how Lunchtime Writing works. 500 words of prose a day, every day, is 182,500 words a year. 500 words every weekday is 130,000. That’s as much, or more, as writers who binge-write a few thousand words every few days. And the best of it is, you don’t feel like you’re writing a lot, because you’re only doing it for about half an hour a day.
This is why I’d really recommend Lunchtime Writing particularly for people who are in the headspace of wanting to get serious about writing, but feeling like they can’t take the time away from work or caring. Maybe, once you get into the practice of writing, you’ll find you can write more, or you can make more space in your day for it. But if you’ve ever said “I have a good idea for a novel but I never seem to find the time…”
…then here’s how to find the time.
A Doctor Of Many Things 